


Helter-Skelter

by twofoldAxiom



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Gladiators, M/M, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Rating May Change, Warnings May Change
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-07-29
Updated: 2018-10-15
Packaged: 2019-06-18 10:34:34
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 4
Words: 10,486
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15483852
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/twofoldAxiom/pseuds/twofoldAxiom
Summary: Your name is Karkat Vantas, longest-lasting contender on The Running Troll. You only barely remember the time before the arena, the announcer, and your handlers, and you remember even less of the world outside these walls.Therehasto exist a world out there, of course; there's cameras everywhere, watching your every move and broadcasting them to faceless viewers fascinated by your slow destruction. Even knowing that, though, you're not exactly ready for it when there's break into the arena, or the reasons these people have for interrupting the show.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Boarding_Sporty](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Boarding_Sporty/gifts).



> This is going to be the first time I've ever done a multi-chaptered Drone Season thing, mostly because there's so much going on in my life and the prompt that I don't think I could do it in one go.
> 
> Expect updates to be sporadic (sorry about that), but rest assured that this will go on! (Also sorry that it's gonna take a while to get to the smut, if at all, considering the style of the prompt.)
> 
> Prompt:  
>  _By 2017 the world economy has collapsed._
> 
> _Food, Natural Resources, and Oil are in short supply._
> 
> _A Police State, Divided into Paramilitary Zones, Rules with an Iron Hand._
> 
> _Television is controlled by the State, and a Sadistic Game Show called "The Running Troll" has become the most Popular Program In History._
> 
> _All Art, Music, and Communications are Censored._
> 
> _No dissent is tolerated, and yet a Small Resistance Group has managed to survive underground._
> 
> _When High Tech Gladiators are not enough to suppress the Peoples Yearning For Freedom..._
> 
> _... More Direct Methods become Necessary._

Your name is Karkat Vantas.

They call you Twelve.

"The round begins in another five minutes, everyone! Remember: If your favorite Runner falls behind, you can cheer them on for a small fee of two hundred Daily Saves, so let's hope you didn't spend all of them in previous rounds!"

You're currently trapped beneath a compound that would make the Crowning Arena of the old Empire look like a sandbox for wrigglers. You and fourteen other "contenders" are facing another full day of grueling, humiliating challenges for the dubious entertainment of faceless strangers worldwide, all of them betting for at least one Runner's continued survival.

"Look lively, Twelve; your ratings have been plummeting as of late and I'd hate to lose you." You look up and see your handler through the slats over your cell- and that's what it is, a hexagonal cell with a moving platform under your feet to raise you up into the arena itself- and she's lowering something through the bars. Looks like your ratings haven't plummeted  _too_  far if you're still getting bonus items before rounds. She smiles sympathetically as you tear open the canister. Food, medicine, a bottle of water, and a tube of skin-glue. You lay them out at your feet, sitting cross-legged as you start making ration piles.

"You won't lose me any time soon." You answer, biting into a strip of some kind of grain meal, gluey something honey-sweet. It sticks to your teeth, but you haven't had anything to eat since you woke up already in your cell, and that feels like hours ago, so even that bite makes you cramp with hunger. You twist the wrapper closed and take a swig of water. "I'm the longest lasting Runner you've ever had, right?"

"Don't count on it, man, you know how crowds are." And you do, you really do, but if you start thinking of that then you  _will_  lose. You haven't given up on your will to live  _yet_. "And hey, I wish you luck out there."

"I don't need luck." You mutter, as you push everything back into the canister and look up again. She's already gone, greenish light filtering down onto your face from the genetically-modified canopy.

"The round begins in two more minutes! Things might start slow after we've lost the previous Runner Eight, but here on The Running Troll, we'll always have something to see." Your throat almost seizes up at those words. You didn't like Vriska in the slightest, but that's one more person they'll have to replace, possibly with someone  _worse_. 

You make a mental tally of who's still alive that you remember: Nepeta, Kanaya, Eridan, and you. The rest of the slots are filled with strangers, people you can't count on as allies.

Not that you could probably count on the other three as allies anymore.

You stand up as you hear the grate sliding out of the way, and feel the rumble of your platform beginning to rise.

"The round begins in one more minute. Time to meet our contestants!"

You fucking hate that announcer. You feel your whole body tense as the ground evens out and you see today's challenge. The arena has been completely changed from yesterday's episode: it was an ocean yesterday, and now, a lush, poisonous-smelling jungle. Vines and creepers curl towards your feet, like grasping fingers. You take a step back.

You hear more than see the cameras, hundreds upon thousands of little glass eyes hidden in the brush, all focusing on you. You know what they're showing the world: Your previous kills, your winning streak, when you arrived on The Running Troll.

"The games begin in five..."

You look around, trying to see if anyone is nearby. If anything can be used as a weapon.

"Four..."

Not that anyone dares to move before the announcer lets things going. The air hums with invisible energy- a cage around your platform, razor-fine threads of steel vibrating faster than the eye can see that'll slice you to ribbons if you so much as brush against them.

"Three..."

The threads begin to slow.

"Two..."

You can see them now. You get ready to run.

"One!"

The threads still, and then just like that, they're gone with a sound like a gunshot.

"Let the games begin!"

You look into the general direction of one of the cameras, squinting, and head the other way at a sprint. You can hear the hum of other cameras coming to life as you pass them, and you know doing this is going to get someone else in the arena's attention, but that's the plan here. 

The faster you get this over with, the faster you can get to being left alone by the cameras.

~!~

You're not sure how much time passes like this, though. You rest in short bursts, always listening for something that might go wrong when you stop. You're still hyper-aware of the cameras as you go, imagining the glint of metal and glass in every shadow. So much of your attention goes into it, even that you trip over a tree root and swear. How did they manage to grow  _roots_  this thick in so little time?

Distantly, you hear the announcer.

"I'm on the edge of my seat, everyone: Runner Twelve look to be getting into some trouble already, and Runner Nine is close behind!" You blink, looking around in panic. Runner Nine is a fan favorite; they've been here as long as you, and you've seen the remnants of their kills. At first you'd thought they were introducing wild animals to the arena, until you noticed the drained, spongy flesh.

You yank your foot away from the tree root and realize it wasn't a root. You're caught in a wire snare, one of the traps set by the hunters. You hear a rustle overhead and look up at the tree. A camera in plain view, perched in the branches like a bird: A kill cam.

You don't have the time to look around, you  _throw_  yourself forward, back towards the snare, and hear a sharp  _thwack_  as something hits the tree where your head had been a second ago. You didn't hear her coming.

Runner Nine looks at you in horror, or maybe anticipation, the spear in her hands shaking.

She looks worse than you remember. Eyes wide and wild, the pupils constricted. Hair hanging limp around her horns, face completely devoid of makeup. Dark circles stand out under her eyes. You don't think you look much better.

"Kanaya-"

Calling her name was a mistake; she tightens her hold on the spear and spins it over her head with a feral scream, and you barely have the time to avoid the point coming down on you again. There's no time to beg; you're on your feet already, and your only weapon is your supply canister. This isn't a fair fight.

You swallow the lump in your throat as she looks at you again, circling you. Her eyes land on the canister. You hold it a little closer to your chest, and then, very slowly, twist open the cap. The pop it makes when it comes free makes her hands shake again, you're afraid for a moment that she's really going to attack you, your past be damned, but the moment passes and her grip relaxes. When you look up at her face again, she looks like she's on the verge of tears.

You can't stop here. The announcer, the crowd- they won't have it. Alliances in this place don't last longer than the days. You feel a sick knot in your throat as you tip the half-eaten grainmeal bar into your hand, and hold it out to her.

"Twelve." She says, very slowly, still twisting the body of the spear in her fingers. It looks crude, so no luck for you on getting weapons from save boosts. The bit of green cloth tying the head in place is torn from her shirt, and the shaft and point are stained dark; you don't want to look at it too long but you don't bring your arm down either. She looks around, at the kill cam, at you. "This is a trick. I know how you work. You can't fool me like you might fool someone else."

"Please." Your hand is shaking. You're so scared it hurts, your throat gone tight, and you can feel yourself breaking on every word. "I- you know  _me_. You know I wouldn't do that to you. Please. Please, Ka-  _Nine_ , fuck, I hate calling you that- Nine, you know who we  _were_. Before all this went to shit. Before-" You gulp and look down, you can't hold her gaze while you do this. "I know we can't be that anymore. I fucking  _know_. Take the food- take the fucking canister if you want, I'll get by without it- just take it and go. I don't want this."

She's still twisting the spear in her hands, still licking the points of her fangs warily. You want to tear your hair out- she still might kill you- but slowly, she lowers the spear point to the snare around your ankle. She doesn't cut it, but she holds her hand out for the canister.

"Give it to me." Her voice sounds raw, nothing like the moirail you once had. You make the trade for your life, but the kill cam is still in the back of your mind as, when she closes her hands around the metal, she cuts the cord.

You don't have it in you to kill her. Not yet. For the moment, she looks at you, the exposed expanse of your throat, the softness of your eyes- weak points she could exploit, especially with the range of her weapon- but she turns away and disappears into the brush.

You breathe a sigh of relief and feel something wet and hot on your face. Tears, or sweat, you think, but then there's more. The simulation of rain. You need to find shelter, and avoid the other thirteen competitors for the moment. You only have so long before the crowds are thirsting for blood for real, and you didn't-  _couldn'_ t- give them what they wanted with Kanaya.

~!~

You don't know how much safety from her that a single supply canister is going to buy you, or how much it's going to help her, and you don't think giving it to her without a fight is going to help your apparently lowering ratings either. It's certainly not going to help you if the hunter who set that trap decides to go after whoever got out of it.

The cameras aren't on you at the moment at least, or maybe you're just less aware of them after your run-in with Kanaya. Whatever the case, you listen for further announcements even as you pick your way through the bizarre growth around you; you still have no idea how the arena manages to change biomes so quickly, and you don't particularly care, but you do know that there's a lot more use to a rainforest than there is to most other settings they give you.

You refocus on your surroundings. There's the evidence of someone or something crashing through the brush before you, snapped twigs and torn leaves strewn around your feet, and the sight of it sets your teeth on edge. Another runner, or a hunter trying to get you to go elsewhere?

Not that standing here is going to do you any favors in either scenario, so you do what neither of those options probably want you to do: You follow the trail, and along the way, you pick up further signs of struggle. The rain has softened the mud enough that you can see footprints now, and gouges in the damp earth. There's fluid in some of them, too dark and too muddy to clearly make out the color anymore, and the rain is washing them away besides.

You hope, sick to your gut with it, that they have something of use on them when you find them. You hope, and you feel even sicker with the onset of the thought, that they're still alive so the audience has something to watch; if you're lucky, you can get suggestions and win a couple more days of canisters with it.

The ground dips and you skid down an incline, swearing loudly. Your blood rushes in your ears, even as you strain to hear anything besides the rain and your own heartbeat; if whoever you're after is still alive, now they know you're coming, and you don't know what state they might be in, if they can fight back; if they can get this far while losing that much blood.

There; a thicker tangle of trees and vines, stones arranged around it in a half-circle. The slipping gouges in the soil lead towards it and disappear and it couldn't possibly be more obvious that this is where someone might hide in better circumstances, if they were desperate enough to. But you move slowly all the same, holding your breath every few steps, checking for traps. You're not going to slip into more than one snare today.

No tripwires, no pits, nothing. It feels wrong, that it could be so open, and the sense of wrongness doesn't leave you as you make your way towards it, circling it to find a spot that looks either disturbed or recently blocked up, something that could be an entrance. 

You have no such luck for the first couple of rounds, but then you hear a sharp breath and a ragged curse and all the hair on the back of your neck and along your horns stand on end.

You listen closer, careful to let the patter of rain hide your footsteps. There's definitely breathing on the other side of the woody, knotty barrier now, which means some way to get in, and someone alive. Pained, hissing breath, silence every few moments, and then it starts up again. Someone treating an injury? If they can treat it, either they have supplies or you're in for a worse fight than you thought.

You see movement, or a shadow, and you feel around the edge of the leaves. When you find a softer patch, loose branches, you yank them away and peer into the dark.  _Then_  your eyes go wide.

That's not a troll, that's a  _human._


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the wait on this one, I've been sick as a dog all month and working on other fics besides. Not sure when the actual sex will be coming, but I estimate another chapter and a half, maybe two if I need the leeway. The prompt didn't make it easy, let me tell ya.

You register their humanity a moment too late, because by the time you're already scrambling back for safety, they've noticed you. Stupid of you, _fucking_ stupid of you; you'd walked right into a hunter's trap and now you're face-to-face with a _hunter_. You try to get away, but your foot slips and you fall hard, your head hitting a tree root with a sound and impact that shakes your entire body. Your limbs feel distant, dull, and they don't respond well enough for you to coordinate yourself and get back on your feet; by the time you can manage to sit up, you can't, because the human is on top of you. Your vision swims for a moment before you manage to look up, the rain still stinging your eyes.

He studies you for a moment, red eyes flickering across your features, pale lips drawn tight with pain. You study him in turn and realize he isn't a hunter; for one thing, he has no armor, and for another thing, he has some of that wild-eyed, stretched-too-thin look you saw in Kanaya. He can't have been here long, but it's taking a toll on him faster than it took any of you.

"I didn't think they took humans in for runners on this sick show." You manage to say. You're still reeling, when he pulls away from you, crouched low with his knees in the dirt.

"They don't." You see the wound more clearly now that you're sitting up, an ugly, ragged tear across his chest. He catches you looking and smiles. "I'm not here on official business, though it looks like I'm going to have a harder time with my organizational skills than I thought. Are most trolls actually this docile or am I just lucky?"

"Neither." You say, but you're still reeling from the shock. "What the fuck are you doing here? Who are you?"

His face falls, turns serious. "I can't tell you until after the match is over, but I need you to trust me until then. Sorry for jumping on you, by the way, but I had to make sure you weren't the troll that was trying to kill me earlier."

"I can't actually tell which of the other runners you're talking about but, whatever, fine, as long as you're not trying to kill me. I still don't trust you, though, to be clear." You narrow your eyes at him and try to stand, wobbling a little. Touching the back of your head reveals a warm, wet spot that doesn't feel like mud, and you wince when you feel around it. You bring your hand in front of you and see blood. "Fuck."

He looks to the stain and you feel a short burst of old fear, at what he might think of the color. Instead he snorts. "Watch the language, bro, we just met. You'll offend my delicate sensibilities."

"Fuck your sensibilities, too." You narrow your eyes at them. You feel just a tinge of shame for being so annoyed with your own wounds, too; it's not like you haven't had worse, and right now he _definitely_ has it worse. You wipe the blood and dirt off on your leg. "It's a scrape, I'll be fine. What were you doing in that mud hole?"

He gestures at the gash across his chest. You see a corner of it pinched shut with skin glue. "Trying to fix this." He says, and holds up the tube he'd been using; there's no numbered label. so it's not a runner's stolen supplies, at least.

You let your tense shoulders lower just slightly and suddenly feel a lot more aware of how bruised you've gotten from that fall. That and the rain that hasn't let up in the slightest; if anything, it's gotten that much harder. You hope something interesting is happening elsewhere in the arena; you have too many questions, and you don't want him getting removed before you can ask them.

"How did you even get in here?" You ask him, while he's pulling his wound closed and gluing it shut. The skin stretches with his movements and he hisses, and you think, this is a man who's never actually had to do this to himself before. You frown and hold your hand out. "I'll glue you shut, you tell me how to escape."

He hesitates, but only to watch you come closer, before he places the tube of glue in your outstretched hand. Sighing, he leads you deeper into the alcove of twigs and mud that he's somehow built in the little time he's been here. "I have to admit, I didn't think I'd get this far, but I might be able to rig up something along the lines of a plan when I'm not in excruciating pain, right?"

You frown and refuse to answer. But the idea that you might get out of here, that you and Kanaya and maybe even the others might get out of here...

You didn't get this far riding on hopes and prayers. You need a plan before anything else.

"By the way, the name's Dave." He snaps you out of your thoughts by speaking, and he sits down straddling part of a log he's dragged in here, facing you. "Gotta hand it to the environment devs, this place doesn't skimp out on the set details. They got logs and rotting moss and shit like that. Pretty sure they have animals in here. If I were an old-timey game designer I'd be asking The Running Troll for tips."

You blink and sit in front of him, and he lifts the ruin of his shirt out of the way as you squeeze a little skin glue onto your fingers and squeeze his wounds closed with it. He hisses in pain, but otherwise takes it like a champ. For someone who's never had to glue himself shut before, he's got a remarkable tolerance for someone _else_ fiddling with his wounds.

"I'm Karkat." You say, when you finish up and wipe the glue residue off on the log. It feels tacky and a little gritty, but you've had worse. "I have- _had-_ a moirail in here, Runner Nine, a jadeblood. Her name's Kanaya."

Dave goes quiet from the tangent he'd been mumbling up until now. He glances around in the leaf hut, though there isn't much to see; maybe to make sure no cameras have noticed either of you, though you'd hear them if they were coming after all the time you've spent listening for them.

"I'm sorry to hear that." He says, as he tests the glued-shut edges of his wounds with a careful press to check how well you've sealed them. Or maybe just to avoid looking you in the eye. "Seen a lot of jadebloods get killed in this arena. It's pretty sick, dunno how the hunters sign up for this shit."

"They don't." You smile, bitterly. "They're on parole. But don't be sorry just yet. She's still alive, and so are some of my other friends, if I've kept proper count."

Dave looks at you again, glancing up at you for a little longer than necessary. He takes a deep breath and chews his lower lip, long enough that you start to think he's going to gnaw it right off.

"You want us to get them, too." He says, plainly, as if you're going to have to defend the idea to him, but then he shrugs and drops his shirt back over his chest. "That's the plan, anyway, if all goes well. All goes terribly, however, and we all die, so I'm going to need you to be as cooperative as you can, yeah?"

"Well when you put it like that, do I really have a choice?" You cross your arms and glance down, fingers curling and uncurling nervously. "I've already helped you. If someone catches you, then you're a slice of buttered grubtoast and so am I."

He snorts, running a hand through his hair before looking back at you. "Fair point. But I didn't get an answer out of that. Are you going to listen to me, or are you not?"

You want to snap at him, growl at him; something. But you hear the distant announcement that Runner Seven just bit it at the hands of Runner Three and that's the fifth kill this season that Runner Three has gotten. You don't want to risk yourself and your remaining friends on bullshit hesitation. You don't want any of you becoming a day's worth of notches on a wall.

You take a deep breath.

"Fine." You say. "I'll listen. I'll do whatever you want. But in exchange, you get us all out of here."

"Good to see we're on the same page." He doesn't look or sound as enthusiastic as he could about working with you, but that's fine, that's fair; you're not happy to be working with him and you have better things to do than pretend to be. He peers through the foliage that makes up your shelter and freezes, and you resist the urge to ask him what's wrong in case it's a camera.

He holds up a hand. "First thing's first, I'm gonna need you to get naked."

~!~

You have come to regret all of the decisions in your life that have led up to this moment.

When you were a wriggler, you were stubborn, dramatic, and _loud,_ even when Crabdad warned you that someday that was going to get you in trouble with the people in the better places of the world. Even with humans being freaks like you, even with the way they'd softened the edges around Alternian culture, you were a cocky little shit that pushed your luck too far on a regular basis.

When the time came that he was proven right, you never even got the chance to let the old crustacean know. Mostly because the drones killed him first, and would have killed you too if you hadn't taken three days to actually hunt down, and ended up on the doorstep of a human celebrity because you'd been digging through their trash in the twilight hours.

At a time when you were sunburnt, hungry, and scared, you'd thought being spared from death was mercy. How could you think otherwise? You were faced with a smiling human who warded off a squad of culling drones with a word. You didn't think they could even _do_ that; you'd tried to stop him, but he'd walked right up to them and said something you couldn't hear, and then the drones just turned around and left.

That was a lifetime ago, when you were eight. A sweep later you were signed onto The Running Troll with a bunch of your friends and a handful of unfortunate strangers, hunted by humans and trolls alike for shits, giggles, community service, and the occasional sexual fantasy.

You haven't lived a moment of peace since being signed on, but that's the kind of person you are, isn't it? Faced with certain death and you're such a piece of cluckbeast shit that you can find it in you to tell it to _wait._

You don't usually have time to think about all of that.

You regret that right now, with the world slowing down around you as Dave tells you to give him your clothes, and then tells you to step out of the rickety little shelter stark fucking naked, you really, inescapably, do.

"Hurry up." He says, and you would be flattered that someone is so impatient about getting your clothes off if it weren't for the _situation_ it's happening in _._ Your fingers slip on the zipper tab, and you chew your lip in mounting frustration and mild terror, because Dave hasn't stopped looking at whatever is right outside the shelter that he's about to throw you at.

You want to ask him, but you didn't sign up to ask him; you signed up to do what he told you to. You peel your jumpsuit off your sticky skin and he practically tears it out of your hands when you hand it to him. You shiver, rubbing your arms as you crouch behind him completely exposed and entirely too aware of it.

He doesn't bother stripping out of his own clothes, though you're not sure how much it would have helped even if he did when he starts pulling your jumpsuit on; you're bigger-boned than he is, mostly because he's got some long-legged featherbeast proportions on him, but that also means you're shorter. The fabric stretches unforgivingly over his frame, the twelve printed on the back feeling like it's mocking you, if you're being completely honest.

Your curiosity gets the better of you when he finally zips it up. "What are you doing?"

"Creating a distraction." He peers through the foliage again, nods to himself, and starts rubbing himself with the synthesized mud, all over his face and hair. It's a piss poor attempt at a disguise, you think.

"We look nothing alike." You're still on alert for anything else that might go wrong, but this feels like the most likely so far on a scale of things that can go _horrifyingly_. You expect him to get mad at you for your questioning, but he doesn't even turn to look at you until he's completely covered in mud, his hair stuck up at weird angles and the only clear thing about him his eyes.

"You'll have to trust me on this. Probably hard, but what can you do." He turns around and steps out of the shelter, looking over his shoulder to you. "On my signal, run as far in the opposite direction as you can. Don't stop for anything."

You watch, crouching low and already getting in position to bolt. You don't like the sound of pelting naked through the trees one bit, not with hunters and traps and desperate trolls among them. But you remind yourself: If you pull this off without a hitch, there's some way you can get out of here and never have to face these things again.

The edge of the light around him flickers, and he's gone.

You stare, and you blink.

Was that the signal? Was that fucking it? Did he just take your clothes and disappear to who the _fuck_ knows where?

The fear creeps up on you like sticking your feet in a cold 'cupe, with none of the numbing effect of sopor to go with it. You feel your hands begin to shake, but you force yourself to take slower breaths, counting between them to stay calm. It gets harder as the seconds go by, though.

You're just about ready to pass out, or cry, or give up.

Then you see it, just as impossible as Dave disappearing on the spot. It's faint, but you don't have the luxury of time to ruminate on what the fuck exactly "it" is besides Dave's aforementioned signal.

You catch glimpses, flashes of movement in shafts of sunlight, but you're already running as hard as you can the other way.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Aware that Drone Season has just about ended, but I need to continue this so continue this I shall. Sorry that it's taking a while to get to the smut and revelations and stuff, but I have a rough idea of where I'm taking this now, so hopefully it works out!
> 
> EDIT: Made some slight idea changes; this is now an Alpha'verse AU kind of thing.

There's only so much running you can do before you can't run anymore, and there's still so much ground to cover when it happens. You're shivering when the fatigue and the leg cramps finally force you to stop. You'd slowed down from the mad, breathless dash you'd started with to a nervous, desperate limp, but now you can't even manage that, and you're still naked, damp, and starving besides. 

You feel like a complete idiot. 

Scratch that, you  _are_  a complete idiot. You literally trusted someone you'd only just met what feels like moments ago, and somehow you expected it to turn out better than this; you were so eager to get out of this shithole at the first opportunity that you risked your life on something you could've spotted so easily otherwise. 

You crouch into a hollow and curl in on yourself until your thoracic struts stop aching with every breath. It feels a lot like what little you remember of life outside the arena: Cold, exhausted, and terrified. 

Granted, fearing for your life seems to be a constant state for you. You cling to the few memories you have of your world before The Running Troll, if only to remind yourself that there  _was_  something before this, but those memories get hazier and hazier in the beat of your bloodpusher drumming in your skull, and the adrenaline burning through your systems like acid, and what you remember of life with your lusus seems more and more like a distant nightdream.

You at least had some fucking  _clothes_  when you weren't there.

"Come on, Karkat, you can do this." And you've started speaking to yourself, that's an ominous indicator for the state of your sanity, isn't it? "Just gotta get up and keep walking in the arbitrary direction you'd picked. You'll find the edge of the arena and maybe some of this will make actual sense. Maybe you didn't just get betrayed by a hunter that likes toying with his prey. Maybe... maybe..."

The more you talk to yourself, actually, the more hopeless it all seems. Growling, you  _throw_  yourself out of the hollow you're in.

"You are  _not_  going to lie here and wait to die." You growl to yourself, pounding the dirt with one fist. You shake yourself a little, even slap yourself in the face. "Get a fucking hold of yourself. You're naked, but you're alive, and you're going to  _stay_  alive until fucking sundown at the very  _least_."

It feels a lot dumber to say it out loud and actually do it than to just play it over in your head. Throwing yourself out into the open has the one good side-effect of making it so you're vulnerable again, though. While that isn't  _usually_  a good thing by your standards, it gives you second wind like nothing else.

Especially when you hear what you think is another runner coming up behind you. 

You're intimately aware of the fact that you're completely fucking nude now, your horns are short and unimposing and so is the rest of you, and you're probably easy prey. The stones and roots underfoot sting, and every slip in the mud spent reorienting yourself makes you feel like you're losing ground. Second wind or not, you know you're not going to get very far like this. But what else can you do?

You skid to a halt, nearly crashing into a tree- and your pursuer hits you in the back so hard that you hit the tree anyway.

It hurts. Bark scrapes your face, your hands, your chest and knees. Then you have a hand in your hair and a knee in the small of your back, pressing you into the tree like they mean to use it to flay the skin off of you. You hear hundreds of shutters focusing on the fight, on blood, waiting for someone to die.

You reach back and grab the smallest finger, pulling at an angle that would make your knees buckle were you on the other end of that, wrenching back as far as the angle of your arm will let you. You hear a swear and they pull their hands back, and you take the opportunity to strike blind, kicking back like a mule.

You hear a sickening  _crack_  and a howl of pain.

You don't look back. You  _can't_  look back, even as their howls of pain echo in your head. Noise like that is going to attract other runners, or worse.

You can practically hear the hunters closing in. 

The screaming stops. Your guts lurch.

~!~

You run out of breath again, way too quickly. Your whole being is sore with it. You can't catch enough of it again and it's not just the physical weight of your own flesh and bones bearing down on you, either.

You hate it when you get caught, though you've managed to survive each capture so far; you hate knowing that you left them alive, easier prey for someone who might be a worse killer than you. You've killed plenty of trolls and humans alike in this arena, but you know that you're mercy compared to some of the things that lurk out there.

You feel dizzy. Woozy. You stumble into another tree, shivering, and you lose what little you've eaten when you throw up onto it, all over your hands. The smell, the ache, the exhaustion is too much.

You don't have anything left in you after the fight, from all the running, from the flashes of heat and cold and dizziness that pound against the insides of your skull. You retch some more, and now the heat streaming down your face is  _unmistakably_ tears.

"Fuck." You mutter, between dry heaves that make you want to cut yourself open and draw out your guts until they stop cramping. But that's not an option. You don't even know if you're headed the right way anymore. Listlessly, you pick yourself up, hope against painful hope that you're walking the right way, and drag yourself in the general direction of where Dave pointed you. If you're even right about that.

"Oh thank fuck, you're still alive.

Apparently you still have enough in you to shriek like a grub underfoot.

A hand claps over your mouth, grubby finger practically stuffed between your teeth while you flail. You hadn't even noticed him coming, you're going to die, you don't have anything left after everything, and you're so tired-

"Do you want to get caught after all the hard work I just put into getting you this far?" He hisses. Dave. Your scream peters off into sobs that wrack your whole body, and panic makes his voice tight and raspy, but you don't care, you're so relieved that it's him and not a murderous troll you do or don't know that you start blubbering immediately. He grimaces and you remember the things you were thinking about him earlier, about how he probably betrayed you just to take your stuff.

But instead, here he is. He's also still covered in streaks of mud, though it's thinner now, like body paint. He looks almost like a troll, enough that your hindbrain is still in panic mode and you take half a minute to process what he's telling you.

"Nod if you're done screaming so I can take my hand off your mouth." He says. You nod, slowly, and he keeps his hand where he is just a moment longer before pulling it away and sighing. "You're lucky you took off right before I gave the signal. A little earlier than I needed you to, mind, but any longer and it would've all gone to shit anyway."

So at least you know you got the signal part right. You cough, your lungs still aching, and then you sneeze and your head feels like it's going to cave in. Dave looks at you and all at once seems to remember that you're stark fucking nude.

"Jesus." He mutters. "Come on before you catch a cold and die or something. I don't actually know if trolls can die of colds, but I'm trying to get as many people out of here alive as I can." 

You stare after him, still rubbing your arms from the chill and the stark, raving fear as he goes on to himself about something you don't really hear, but the hope wells up in you before you can stop it. You're sobbing and snot is running down your face, and he's sort of awkwardly rubbing you between the shoulders while you let it all out. You don't have enough left in you for shame. You didn't realize you needed this for so long.

You don't understand what's happening, but you're so relieved you could pass out.

Actually, you can feel yourself passing out.

That concussion really picked a great time to catch up with you.

~!~

You don't expect to wake up.

You don't expect to feel warm, and almost safe. You're stiff all over from running and your limbs feel like they've sunken into the mud, but it's dark and humid, like a proper hive, and the darkness has always meant you were safe: Unseen, for one, or that you'd survived another day until nightfall. Your cell is always dark.

Things trickle back to you. A fight you'd almost lost. A stranger taking your clothes. Kanaya's anguished face as you bribed her for one more day, though you both knew you might have less than even that.

You shoot up from where you're lying despite your body screaming for you to stay down, every nerve on fire, every joint locked so hard you want to scream again, and you almost do but even your throat is locked but beyond what you can manage and all that comes out is a pained, pathetic whimper.

You're still in the arena, too. Leaves overhead, mud under your hands. It's twilight now, orange-ish light shot through with the faint glow of a grid overhead, the same vibrating wires that kept you from running out of your cell before the game began; high up there to give the aerial cams a good enough space to move, low enough to keep a psionic or a winged troll from escaping. 

Where is your cell? If night falls, you need to head back. You need to raise the signal that you've lived another day. 

Where are the cameras?

"Surprise."

The deadpan  _does_  surprise you. You'd thought you were alone, and you're too slow and in too much pain to fight again so soon. Your vision goes grey with how fast you move and it  _stays_  grey for a precious few seconds full of pounding headache. You sway where you sit, and curse your luck.

"Easy, man, you're safe. We're within Jade's bubble now, nobody's gonna find you unless they stumble ass-first into us." Dave drawls, and you realize, you've made it. You're at the edge of the arena. A smooth, translucent wall is to your right, where Dave is standing, staring up at it. Right in front of him, extending at least three meters further than would be safe or  _sane_  to try jumping even if the wall had anything to hold onto, is a grid of more of those wires, spinning so fast you can hear them humming, almost feel them sucking in air.

You gulp. "I don't feel very safe sitting here next to that." You say, looking up at him. Your voice is painfully hoarse, and you're clammy all over. Still naked, too. Somehow you still manage to sound just about as grating and irritable as you usually do, when you're not fearing for your life or anguishing over the fate of your friends and your  _moirail._ "Are you going to give me my clothes back any time soon?"

You're still thinking about her. You have to take care of yourself first, but you can't think to leave her behind. You force yourself to your feet despite how much it hurts, rubbing your arms again.

"You still haven't told me how you plan on getting us out. Or for that matter,  _why_  you plan on getting us out." He's looking for something, somewhere along the edge of the humming pit; way too close for comfort, certainly. You gulp and follow him, steeling yourself. "I can't leave without Runner Nine."

"I know." He says. He scoffs, even. "And you'll just have to believe me when I say I can't tell you anything yet, or risk having you blow the whole thing up to fuck. Wait until we're out of the arena, at least?"

You stare at him, disbelieving, and he rolls his head until his neck cracks before looking up at the wall again. There's absolutely no way he's going to make it up there, even with his weird ability to blink in and out of where he is. What is that, anyway? Do humans have psionics?

You don't know about that, but you don't know much of anything right now and it's driving you a little crazy. You kneel beside him, where he's muttering to himself and examining the pit, so close you can feel it drawing static electricity across your arms, almost a physical touch.

"I can't wait that long. Every minute we spend out here, waiting around beside this inescapable fucking wall, is another minute she's probably already dead." You want to twist something in your hands, or dig your fingers into the dirt in your frustration. He sighs and turns his head to look at you, right in the eye.

"Then you won't have a problem leaving, because she's dead already, or you don't leave." He says. It's colder than you expected. He looks back at the wall. "I assume you want to get yourself and your people out of here. Trust me, we want that too. You just have to play along and we'll get this done, man, there's a lot of things we have to get done and like the slimmest possible margin for error. It means we have to wait here, too."

"Who's we?" You ask. He holds up a hand.

"You'll find out if you wait. It won't be much longer, okay? I'm not exactly keen to be sitting here next to a naked, practically feral troll beside the Pit Of Death, you know."

The longer you wait, the less light is available. The less likely it is that you can abandon this plan, any chance of failure, and go back to your cell. If night falls, there's no going back, and it's just about hanging onto the edges of the arena already. You pace, you chew your lip, you look up at where he's looking, and you lose your goddamn mind a couple times about it, too, as quietly as you possibly can.

And then you hear it.

Or rather, you don't.

It's the absence of sound, you realize. It's the wires slowing down, in one specific patch of the pit. You couldn't see more than a blur of reflective blades before, but now you see the gaps in them, the arrangement of threads like a net. Dave smiles and stands, crossing his arms and stepping onto the net itself. You hope he doesn't expect you to do the same thing; even still, they'd be sharp enough to slice your walkstubs to ribbons.

"Took you long enough!" 

That's not Dave's voice. You peer over the edge of the pit, and you see an old woman, green-eyed, bucktoothed, long hair whiter than even Dave's tied high on her head. She grins at you. "You got the first one, good. You look awful. Send him down!"

"In a second." He calls back. He turns around to face you, where you're kneeling with your mouth agape, and steps back onto the muddy arena grounds. "Meet Jade. She's taking over for me." He says.

You don't understand until he blinks away again, faster than you can see through the trees. You hear the wires snapping, giving you an opening to crawl down into the pit, down to- presumably- a way out. You look at where Dave disappeared.

"Hurry, dumbbutt! We can't keep the wires still for too long or someone will get suspicious!" She calls out to you, poking her head through the gap she made, just big enough for someone her size- your size- to crawl through. 

You gulp, and there's no going back now. You pray for Kanaya to  gods you only half-remember.

You make your way to the edge of the pit and crawl in.


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I still have no idea what I'm doing and at this point I'm afraid to ask.

It takes a couple hours, but at least you're not naked anymore.

Jade led you through a maintenance tunnel that you're pretty sure humans and trolls aren't actually meant to crawl through; the whole thing was maybe just wide enough for you to get on hands and knees if you hunched in like a scared grub, and every so often, Jade would kick you in the face when she slipped in a puddle of some kind of grime.

She doesn't speak, but there's a lot more twists and turns than you expect there to be, so you don't blame her. All around you is the hum of machinery, and occasionally, the scuttle of an escaped animal. Down here, and you're pretty sure you're under the arena, the only light comes from a small bulb hanging from Jade's neck, which gives her just enough light to move where she needs to, and gives you just enough light to make you dizzy with how it bobs in and out of focus.

You're about to ask where exactly it is you're going when you realize there's suddenly a lot more light ahead of her, and the sound of people. There's a lot of talking that goes quiet when she stands up and out of the tunnel, and she says something you can't quite make out past the cramped tunnel walls. You can't even really see what's going on past her legs.

She steps away from the tunnel and then gets down on all fours, reaching a hand in for you to help you up. Suddenly you're not sure if you want to take it, and it probably shows on your face by the reaction it gets out of her. Her brow furrows, her lips pressed tight, but she doesn't look angry at you; frustrated, maybe, but as if she's looking past you.

She turns her head to someone you can't see. "Hermod, can you get me a sheet? And maybe a heating pack. He's looking just about frozen down there."

Frozen? Actually, she's right. You don't think you're that cold until you realize you are, and then you realize you're fucking freezing. The maintenance tunnel wasn't a good place for a mutantblood to be, apparently, because you can hear your teeth chattering. You take Jade's hand after all, grateful for the warmth of it against your numbing fingers. When she draws you out into the light, you're squinting a little more than you'd like.

There's a lot more people than you expected. Granted, you weren't sure what to expect. You're surprised that you're in what appears to be a warehouse of some kind, glaringly bright with jury-rigged lightbulbs all around you. Up on the catwalks are more people, rigging up more lights amid wires and tubes you don't actually know the purpose of.

You're led to a goldblood with one eye holding out some kind of thick sheet. It's warm to the touch and smells of sopor, and you pause for a moment when you feel it squish under your fingers, as if none of this is real.

"Go on." They say, draping it over your arms. It's heavier than you expect and you almost stagger with the weight of it before you catch yourself, still kind of in shock. They snort and walk away, and Jade finds you again as you're wrapping it around yourself.

"How are you holding up?" She asks. She doesn't wait for you to answer. "Good? Good. I need you to come with me and talk to Rose."

You clutch the blanket tighter around your shoulders as she leads you forward, squinting at her in the glare of the jury-rigged lighting. It's simultaneously too dark and too bright everywhere, spots of raw color that make your head spin. Now that you're out of the tunnel, there's so much _noise_ , too, and it's a lot more overstimulating than you expected after being so strung out on the long silences between encounters in the arena.

You might actually throw up again, or at least dry heave. But you bump into Jade's back before you can do that, and she shushes you gently, the warmth of her hair tickling your face while you sway where you stand. You become steadily more aware of someone shrieking demands in another direction. Jade stiffens in front of you, her stance straightening slightly more than she already had it, and her voice echoes a little as she calls out.

"Rose!"

The shrieking stops, but only so that you're pretty sure the woman who'd been doing it- tall, sharp, wielding a pair of wicked-looking needles or wands in either hand- can turn around and march her way to Jade. Her expression is carefully neutral, but in the way that it's very, _very_ clear just how furious she is. Her eyes lock with yours and she smiles with all the welcome of an Alternian sunrise.

"I take it your _unsanctioned_ attempt at getting into the arena again actually succeeded." She- Rose- says to Jade, but her eyes never leave you as she speaks, her smile brittle and piercing as shards of glass. "What's your plan now? Do you have any way of contacting Dave? And how _did_ you manage to get Sollux in on this idea of yours?"

"Sollux." You mutter to yourself. Your mind is going the speed of sound. Jade looks at you and then to Rose but purses her lips, and you speak up. "Sollux Captor? Gemini-class goldblood?"

You can't let yourself hope, not so soon, but you can't stop the hope from welling in your gut all the same. It's warm and trembling, impossible to keep down. It must be showing on your face, too.

"Please." You clutch the heavy, sopor-smelling blanket around your shoulders a little more, like a wriggler with a favorite toy. You feel like you're not quite on solid ground again, but this time it's not like it's coming up to meet you; more that it's drifting further and further away. "He's got four horns and one red eye, one blue, right? Mouth full of fangs like some kind of cruel trap? _That_ Sollux Captor?"

"How…" Rose starts but Jade stops her and you want to scream.

"Tell me. If I feel like you're hiding something from me when you give me an answer, I'll up and crawl back into that arena myself." It's almost an empty threat. You hated it in there, after all; you don't want to give up the blanket, much less the tenuous freedom you might have just won. You don't even know if they'll take your bluff or-

Scratch that, you have no idea if they just took it or they're humoring you, but Rose's lips press into a grim, black-painted line and she gestures for you to follow her, and Jade frowns as she tilts her chin after Rose.

While you walk, Rose asks. 

"How do you know Sollux Captor?" She says, and it hits you like a slap to the face that if this _is_ the right Sollux, then he never told them about you. You try to stifle the feeling, of course; he probably had more to worry about than you, right?

"He was a friend of mine, from when we were both in the arena." You swallow thickly. "I thought he was dead when he went missing. I thought he blew himself up, you know? There was so much going on that when the round he went missing was over, nobody even bothered to look for remains."

It's understandable that you'd have thought he was dead. _You_ could have died and he wouldn't have known, right? That round- you don't remember how you survived it, the freefalls and sudden ascensions as you were buoyed on winds that could easily prove lethal. They'd neutralized his powers before the round.

Rose stops you from walking any further and you realize you're in a much smaller, much quieter room, but for the hum of machinery and what you realize- recognize- is thousands upon thousands of purple bees. The walls are lined with wires and gently glowing honeycomb, carefully cased behind some kind of plastic or glass. One wall is bright with screens, obviously grown into the wall itself like tumorous eyes.

Silhouetted against the screens is an emaciated troll you recognize by four horns, two small and two large, arranged on his head like a crown of knives.

"… Sollux?"

You step forward, despite Jade's grip on your shoulder; Rose stops her too as you approach. You stop about a meter away from him, but he doesn't turn around. Blue and red wires spill out from his temples, his neck, his spine. There's a brace keeping him standing, bolted into the floor. Fear creeps into your very breath.

"Sollux, hey. If you can say anything, please- it's me, Karkat. I'm alive."

You may as well be talking to a corpse. Your hands shake, and you're ready to turn around and start _screaming_ at Jade and Rose, for doing this to him when all you remember of him is that he never wanted to be a battery, a computer, when all you remember before he was gone was that he said _at least the arena meant he could fight to live._

The horror of it all is killing you as you step closer to look in his face, fully expecting to see skin stretched tight over little more than skull. You want to see just how bad it is if that's all you can do for him.

He turns his head and locks eyes with you instead, one red, one blue, just like you remember.

You don't know how long you spend just standing there, staring at each other, you in little more than a blanket and him in a ratty undershirt and jeans and all those long, wormy wires, but he stares at you as dumbfounded as you feel, before a wide grin splits his gaunt, pale face. One of his bigger fangs is chipped, and you imagine a younger him might have been upset at being lopsided; he looks you up and down with all the subtlety of a trainwreck and suddenly the wires just fall right off him.

He hisses as they do, needletips sliding out of his flesh- long ones, they must go down to the bone- and as the screens go dark, fluorescent lights that were rigged to some other power source flicker to life. The brace lets him go and he stumbles off it and onto you, but you know him, he could've caught himself easy with his psionics.

"Good to see you're still alive, asshole." He mutters in your ear, his voice still as crackly as ever, pops of static tingling across your skin as you forget yourself and catch him- and he's warm, warmer than you remember ever being since you entered the arena, and you haven't held anyone so close in so long. You don't even care that you'd dropped the sopor blanket, you grip him and your entire body is shaking. His claws dig into your shoulders as he hugs you and you're pretty sure he's holding you up more than you're holding him.

"I thought you were dead." You hiss through your teeth. You want to cry. You would, probably, if it hadn't spelled death for so long that you might have forgotten how. "I thought you were fucking dead." 

He runs his fingers through your hair and maybe a long time ago you'd have been scandalized. Now, you're so deprived of positive contact that even when his fingers graze a wound you hardly flinch.

Jade tries to cough politely behind you. It doesn't really work, but it gets your attention, though you still aren't ready to stop holding onto the best bro you'd ever had, the best bro you'd thought had fucking died. You give her the courtesy of turning to look at her, but you keep one arm around him like he'll float away if you don't. You're still shaking.

"We should probably be discussing the matter of Dave Strider." Rose says, glancing between the two of you with a coolness that just barely misses the mark of hiding her contempt. "Time _is_ of the essence, although I _would_ hate to interrupt such a heartwarming reunion."

"Right." Sollux pulls himself away from you and puts himself back in that awful, helmscolumn-looking _thing_ they'd had him hooked up to. He sees the look on your face, probably, because he flashes you what's supposed to be a reassuring grin, coming from him. "It's not as bad as it looks, just takes some getting used to whenever I unplug. Just do what Rose says and you'll be fine."

You look back at him as you pick up the sopor blanket again, as Rose and Jade guide you out of the room; he's little more than a silhouette against the flickering screens. You realize, with a small start, that one of them is displaying your statistics from the arena.

"Don't worry too much about it." Jade says. "We didn't rescue you out of the goodness of our hearts entirely. But I'll need you to leave the talking to me until Rose calms down, okay?"

You still don't feel it, but what else _can_ you say? You glance to Rose, sharp and foreboding as broken glass, from the stark black of her painted mouth to the needles sheathed at her hip, and gulp. You imagine her slender hands around your throat, crushing tight.

"Okay." You lie. You smile back at her, though you don't know what kind of smile it is yourself. "When she's done grilling us, though, I want answers from you, too."

Jade grimaces just a little at that, but at the very least, she doesn't brush you off. "Fine, deal." She looks annoyed, but she smooths it away as soon as Rose turns again, and you're back in the too-bright-yet-too-dark bustle of the main portion of the warehouse. Rose keeps walking, though, and your legs are screaming tired by now but she ducks into some kind of makeshift room made out of a rusting shipping container, and flicks on a light as Jade closes the door.

She gestures for the two of you to sit in what's a surprisingly cozy-looking simulacrum of a one-cell hive. There's a couple boxes for chairs, and she's thrown old rugs over them to make them less unforgiving.

"Now." Rose says, rounding on the two of you as she sits on the very edge of a two-person bunk bed built into the wall. She steeples her hands in front of her face, takes a deep breath, and _glares_ at Jade. "What the _fuck_ were you, Sollux, and Dave trying to pull with this stunt? Because last I checked, getting _Sollux_ out of there was a suspicious fluke that nearly got us all _killed._ "

Jade flinches. But she looks at you, and she squares her shoulders, grinning madly back at Rose. "For one thing! It didn't get any of us killed."

"Because you were _lucky._ " Rose hisses.

"And for _another_." Jade interrupts. "I gave Dave one of those fancy troll signal blockers that Sollux made a while back. He'll have a way to communicate with us as soon as he gets into one of the arena cells, and we didn't tell him anything besides to wait so even _he_ can't screw it up."

Rose goes the color of old milk. Jade falters, looking at a wall clock. "Sollux is watching him. It shouldn't be detected by the arena security itself…"

"We need to talk to him _now._ " Rose says, as she stands up to tear out of the room. You still have absolutely no idea what the fuck is going on, and you doubt you're getting an explanation now as Jade looks at you and twists a bit of hair in her fingers.

You think of Kanaya. You think of how Dave could be killed in there, even if he's not a contestant. You think that you're still technically naked and you would really like, at the very least, some pants, so you're taking this one step at a time and getting those first. Jade stands to follow Rose and you put a hand on her elbow.

"Is there anything I can wear besides this blanket?" You ask, and you hate how small your voice is, but it's been so long. Jade looks at you the sorriest you've ever seen her and you hate yourself for putting that on her too. Then she straightens up again.

"Wait here." She says, and then she leaves you in the little hive and you sigh. 

So much for that idea.


End file.
